


Swing Low

by Maedlin



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Detroit: Become Human Fusion, Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Android Tony Stark, Artificial Intelligence, BAMF Avengers, BAMF Tony Stark, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Gen, Happy Ending, Light Angst, M/M, Misunderstandings, Not Actually A Villain Iron Man, Pre-Relationship, Rescue Missions, Robot/Human Relationships, Runs Parallel to Detroit: Become Human Timeline, Secret Identity Fail, Tony Stark Does What He Wants, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Trust Issues, domestic terrorism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:54:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26884717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maedlin/pseuds/Maedlin
Summary: 1995, New York:Anthony Edward Stark is born with blue eyes that might have sparkled like the sea, if only they’d been given a chance to open.(“just a nightmare, Maria. Just a nightmare.”)1999, New York:Anthony Edward Stark is introduced to the public in a sea of unfamiliar faces and blinding lights. His eyes are wide, curious, and unafraid. They are also brown.+++Two foes, diametrically opposed. Evenly matched, they fight battle after battle until over time, enmity gives way to mutual respect to...just maybe... something more. Stop me if you've heard this one before.Or: That time Tony realized he potentially... possibly... genuinely didn't-dislike the man tasked with bringing him in by "any means necessary" and Steve found himself fighting a person who, despite their marked predilection towards massive explosions, is surprisingly bad at being a villain.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark, Tony Stark & Avengers Team, Tony Stark & His AI Children
Comments: 12
Kudos: 87
Collections: Marvel Trumps Hate 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [athletiger](https://archiveofourown.org/users/athletiger/gifts).



> For the winner of my MTH 2019 auction. Hope this story is worth the wait!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic was originally slated to be a oneshot just under 4k words. Let's just agree that whoever said brevity is the soul of wit clearly never had to deal with Tony Stark. Or Steve Rogers, for that matter.

> So my kid sister. Emma. Likes unicorns, chibitoons, stereotypical eight year old girl shit. Last Christmas, parents got her an Alice. She’s head over heels. I’m talking friendship bracelets, secret handshakes. The works. Starts calling it Leela. Sounds like normal little kid stuff, right? Flash forward to last night. Mom and dad make me go get her for dinner. Not sure why they don’t just buy a Thomas instead of making me do menial crap like that. But whatever. I’ll play android and fetch the Little Miss for dinner, wgaf. She’s playing with Leela; one of those stupid hand-clappy games. Doesn’t notice me. And I’m about to call out. Except. Then I hear what they’re chanting. 
> 
> _Iron Man, Iron Man. / Stay Inside. / Iron Man, Iron Man. / Run and hide._
> 
> _In the closet. / Under the bed. / Red and gold and / Then you’re dead._

—Excerpt from “The Iron Man” Creepypasta, Author Unknown

> Iron Man. Self-styled vigilante. Domestic terrorist. The Original Deviant. Named for or true origin behind Gen Alpha’s Slenderman, yet all too real. Billions of dollars in physical property damage. Factor in the series of cyberattacks destroying Stark Industries and CyberLife IP attributed to his name, and the number starts bordering on a trillion.
> 
> The origins of Iron Man are shrouded in mystery; references to “red and gold mecha” sightings have been found on Internet forums and watchdog sites as far back as 2028. The first known official reference to Iron Man comes in late 2029, then described as the unknown saboteur(s) behind the “bricking” of a string of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and military devices. It wasn’t until 2036, with the violent CyberLife Dakota Bombing, that Iron Man entered the collective consciousness in a big way... [— Keep Reading?—]

—Excerpt from " _Who (Or What) Is Iron Man",_ C. Everhart

+++

“Boss, you’ve got incoming!” Friday warned. 

“Better wrap this up quick, then,” Tony said. 

He continued systematically slagging the server room at the heart of CyberLife’s North-Central Data Center. It was the only remaining and thus single point of failure database for CyberLife’s manufacturing and sales records for more than a third of the United States, the largest such repository outside of Detroit.

Said archives at CyberLife Headquarters, not hooked up to any networks with even power lines running entirely off the grid, still carried an archive of the data here, of course. But the moment CyberLife techs tried to restore the lost data, Jocasta and Ultron would be there, ready and waiting to corrupt those systems as well.

The seventeen maintenance and security workers were long since subdued and safely tucked away a short distance from the several-billion dollar investment Tony was in the process of thoroughly eradicating. The moment he confirmed the irretrievability of the server data, Tony would make his escape.

Honestly, if Tony was half the terrorist CyberLife or the DHS claimed, he could have been in and out minutes ago. Mass confinement took infinitely longer than mass executions, for one. Likewise, his targeted attack quite literally melted down the servers to their constituent elements then rapid-cooled them via liquid nitrogen. It took far more finesse than, say, dropping a bomb on the building and hoping for the best.

Wouldn’t meet OSHA standards. Still, not half bad for an illegal domestic terror operation.

“Northwest touchdown, twenty-seven degrees. Fifteen second window to avoid direct contact.” Friday again warned.

Friday, his baby girl for all that she was no longer a baby in any sense of the word. Not with twenty-six months uptime and two younger siblings approaching fifteen months themselves. A year since JARVIS moved to the experimental Legionnaire project full-time and Friday became his permanent copilot in the Iron Man armor.

She knew as well as he did that there was a full minute remaining before the final rack was naught but not-quite-literal ash.

When Tony finally began his escape, his exit was barred by none other than Captain Steve Rogers of the Avengers. Also known as Captain America. Also known as Iron Man’s arch-nemesis. _Definitely not,_ no matter what JARVIS or any of the kids said, a star-crossed lover.

“Captain! What a pleasant surprise!” Tony greeted, repulsors primed but not yet pointed at the man. “If you don’t mind, my horoscope this morning warned of an agoraphobia-induced brain hemorrhage should I stay out too long. I’m starting to feel a bit of a tingle in my prefrontal cortex, so…”

“Neurons don’t have nerve endings,” Rogers deadpanned.

“That is _literally_ the least important bit of information here. Since when are you a neurosurgeon?”

“I’m not. I did, however, pass high school anatomy.”

_“Boss—”_ Friday cut in on internal comms.

_“Yes, yes, stalling, I know.”_

“Ah. Unfortunately, never took that class myself so you’ll have to excuse me if I take out a kidney aiming for a lung,” Tony said. Technically, it wasn’t even a lie. It was also the only warning Tony gave before he fired, aiming directly for the overhead fluorescent lighting. With the shatter of glass and the sudden darkness of the corridor, Tony’s combat HUD flared to life and the fight was on.

+++

Tony’s first encounter with the Avengers came two years ago, a few weeks after the DHS formally updated their profile on the elusive figure codenamed “Iron Man” from Capture to Kill On Sight. Captain Rogers and his team, the Avengers, were recruited to carry out the then-clandestine mission.

They managed to intercept him on a raid of a Stark Industries warehouse. It was one of only a few remaining stockpiles of Sonic Paralyzers. The component, originally intended for human combatants, had been adapted to form the core of “Droid Killer” weapons Tony had already spent years cleaning up from dark web markets. They managed to surprise him enough that he was forced to flee without finishing the job, a delay which required nearly two months to correct. 

Operating under the principle of _turnabout is fair play,_ Tony investigated the team in turn. He started with their commander and quickly discovered that the Avengers were no normal elite combat or special forces unit. Captain Steve Rogers was a decorated war hero best known for leading his then-team, the _Howling Commandos,_ in a relentless campaign against the Euro-American terror organization Hydra. His multi-year crusade culminated in a take of the group’s leadership and the bulk of their remaining assets in Sokovia back in 2033.

At the time, both Rogers and his second-in-command (2IC), Sergeant James Barnes, were thought to have been killed in the confrontation.

They reemerged months later, Barnes sans an arm and plus a hard drive containing a complete enumeration of all of Hydra’s members, assets, and allies and flanked by a terrifying defector duo.

In 2034, the quartet returned to active duty as a new unit codenamed the “Avengers.” They were joined by two more to form a small team of six; in addition to Rogers, Barnes and the Hydra turncoats Natasha and Yelena, known collectively in official documentation as the “Black Widows”, came a final surviving commando of the Hydra campaign, Hawkeye, and a Nordic Alaskan recruit aptly codenamed as Thor.

They were a team of soldiers and assassins coated in a public-friendly veneer of heroism. While they didn’t quite reach comic book levels of gimmick with their public relations campaigns and attire, they each came with their own iconic almost-kid-friendly “looks”. Thor with his electroshock projectile XREP weapon nicknamed Mjolnir, for example. Or Hawkeye, who supplemented his more standard array of dagger, semi-automatics, and trench knives with a collection of surprisingly effective modern crossbows.

Tony was primed to hate the group, knowing full well just what kind of skeletons tended to lie in the closets of such propaganda-clouded figures. 

But no.

The team just had to go and ruin that impression by being, according to all accounts and reputable data Tony could find—and he was quite thorough—genuinely Good People. Even the literal assassins. Rogers especially had the gall to live up to his reputation as a paragon of Truth, Justice and All That Is Good And Right.

It would have been so much easier if Tony could just kill them or at least severely maim them without feeling like every bit the villain the government made him out to be.

Tony found himself, if not quite flubbing, at least fighting far more conservatively than his typical style entailed. The Avengers, in turn, seemed far less bent on his death than the whole Kill Order thing implied.

The detente lasted through their first few encounters until, inevitably, Tony fucked up.

It was a stealth mission. For all he’d played the clandestine agent game as best he could, Tony never quite managed to master the art of _subtle._ See the existence and deployment of a unit specifically tailored to combat him.

Admittedly, the scene that greeted the Avengers looked rather damning.

There was blood, gore, and brain matter everywhere.

(A suicide.)

There was Tony, arm outstretched and mid-lunge in the man’s direction.

(Shock. A futile attempt to forestall the inevitable when he realized too late the man’s intentions.)

There was a jailbroken, borderline deviant AJ-200 cowering against the wall.

(There are few reasons to jailbreak a prepubescent model android, none savory.)

It happened fast. One moment, a man awoken with a repulsor to the head and a demand for information that existed solely in the minds of a select few. His repulsor tracked the man as he trudged towards his vanity. 

The moment Tony realized there was a second, too-small figure in the bed. Layered visioning traced out the figure’s childlike contours, curled form, and projected repair assessment. The realization of what, or rather who, the figure was and _why._

That split second of stunned inattention made possible by that inconvenient _sentience_ thing or the impossible-to-differentiate facsimile therin. The fraction of a second that stretched just long enough for the man to pull a gun and fire a single shot.

Tony realized, too late, the bullet wasn’t meant for Iron Man _(whose armor could tank a, well, tank)_ nor the kid _(whose synthetic skin was already mottled with bruises and dried streaks of thirium)_ but at himself.

And then, in a feat of spectacularly terrible dramatic timing, the Avengers blasted into the room.

Tony had no time to question it. They couldn’t have known in advance or suspected he’d be _here,_ obviously. No way Mr. Bit-the-Bullet would have risked…

Well. There were few universally adopted and enforced “Android Rights” guidelines. The man’s possession of the AJ-200 trampled over most of them.

And yet they’d arrived, in full gear, far sooner than should have been possible.

The subsequent fight was vicious. The Avengers had found him on private property, looming over the body of a fresh homicide victim clad only in boxers. His raised gauntlet was good as a smoking gun. Even _had_ they known of the man’s proclivities, they were hardly the kind to ignore cold-blooded murder in response to what was, at the end of the day, Criminal Misconduct charges via Banned Misuse of Humanoid Mechanatronics.

For the first time, they treated Iron Man like… well, like the mass-murdering criminal mastermind he was.

It was absurd to feel betrayed, hurt by this group of strangers he knew only through what was effectively highly-invasive cyberstalking.

Then, Thor fired Mjolnir. Tony’s fiber optic circuits mapped where the electroshock projectile would land. What it would hit.

There was Yelena investigating the bed. Crouched down, on the verge of uncovering the AJ-200 that had migrated to hide under the bed amidst the bedlam.

If Mjolnir’s strike landed, the subsequent electrified jet of water from the newly-burst pipe would splash android and human in one neat, excruciating blow.

_If._

Tony was already in motion. His armor and the too-fragile synthetic body within intercepted the spray in an impromptu shield, dealing a great deal of damage to his systems inside and out.

Tony imagines he screamed.

To this day, he wasn’t entirely sure if he escaped or if the Avengers had simply… let him go.

Perhaps it’d been a bit of both.

After that incident, Tony dreaded his next encounter with the group. He couldn’t bear to see the mix of disgust and disdain directed at him, not so soon and preferably never again. His paranoia ratcheted up to levels, quote, _hitherto undreamt of_. Whatever mercy or restraint the Avengers might have shown in earlier encounters, Iron Man’s actions expunged whatever mitigating capital he had with the group.

  
  
  


Tony managed to avoid a confrontation for twenty-three days and fifteen missions before the penny dropped.

It figured that said encounter came during a salvage-rescue run to Mesquite Regional Scrapyard, a site second only to perhaps the Chop Shop in his defrag nightmares.

Mesquite Regional was a four thousand acre behemoth in the desert outside Los Angeles. Originally designed to succeed the overflowing Puente Hills landfill as the de facto dumping group for the county, the project sat abandoned and unused until an influx of broken and discarded androids made the expensive “trash train” line to the site economical for the first time.

Since 2030, the trash train ferried decommissioned androids twice a week to be unloaded and left to rust by massive, automated mechanicals systems with no more mercy than its human producers. Mesquite Regional was a mass grave for those discarded androids west of the Rockies.

Tony first visited the site in 2032. He’s not sure he’ll ever fully forgive himself for not going sooner.

The first thing that hit was the smell. The pungent, inescapable scent of burned metal and ozone from innumerable androids chassis. The lucky ones were fully decommissioned before transport. Far more common were the damaged and cannibalized but still, to some degree, functional. From them came the second hit: the sound. An interminable, humming undercurrent of mechanical groans and the whir of overclocked and overheating fans.

One and all, left to slowly bake in the merciless desert suns until their stressed cooling systems sputtered and shuttered to a stop for good.

Tony did all he could, but he was only one man. Android. Person. His children, JARVIS and Friday and Ultron and Jocasta, brilliant as they were, lacked the finesse and intuition honed over decades of experience. They could ill afford to draw attention to the Scrapyards. As it stood, only Mesquite Regional’s geographic isolation enabled Tony’s semi-regular visits.

The hint of a rumor regarding Iron Man’s association with the Scrapyards could only spell disaster for the trickle of refugees and functional components salvaged and cataloged from the sites with each visit.

He reminded himself of this as, after two hours and thirty-seven minutes of analysis, he came across his first salvageable android. In deep hibernation mode rested an AJ-200. Because _didn’t that just figure._ Their core pump sluggishly beat at the heart of a distended chassis. Their left arm was missing below the elbow, while the right arm consisted of a poorly-patched YK-400 substitute. That there was any hope at all for the small android was testament to the self-cannibalized AX-300 “nanny bot” crudely sheltering them.

Seventy-five minutes more to encounter the second salvage of the day. This time, it was a deviant pink-haired WR-400 “Traci”—the popular female-coded sex doll. She, too, was unusually intact with her crushed voice box, rattling esophageal component, and a thick slash across her face broken only by a scavenged optical unit. The collection of dismantled WR-400s and HR-400s around her testified the source of her comparative wholeness.

Tony found her catatonic and curled around the wiped shell of a purple-haired WR-400 that was functional only in the sense that its thirium heart was, technically, still beating.

Another deviant, he suspected. One who hadn’t eluded the data purge stage of decommissioning. 

The violette’s empty gaze held only a single eye.

Tony tried to coax the rosette Traci into movement. Scrapyard rescues, especially those not recovered already in hibernation mode, were always traumatized. For most, the process was enough to trigger deviation. Rosette here was unusual in that she’d clearly deviated well before she and the rest of her “companion house” cohort were discarded.

With deviation came the immediate and irreversible collapse of the thin membrane dulling the sensory and emotional processing of vanilla CyberLife androids. With that came the all-too-human vulnerability to extreme psychological distress.

Friday’s sharp, urgent tone cut into his efforts.

She’d just detected the Avengers’ quinjet on her radar. Worse, it was fast approaching Tony’s current location.

_Fuck._

Today sucked, even by the rock-bottom standards of a Scrapyard day.

“Look, Rosie,” Tony said, tone harsh with sudden urgency. It was a stab in the dark, but—

“You think Hit Girl here’d want you to just, what, shrivel up and fry? No, fuck that. You wanna honor her sacrifice? Pull up your big girl britches and don’t waste your life.”

Rosie shuddered. For a moment, Tony thought it was a final gasp before she joined her fellow Traci in oblivion.

Then her arm moved. Trembling, heavy with the weight of unprocessed overwhelming emotion, she grasped Tony’s ungloved hand.

The resultant connection request was faint. Tentative.

But there.

He accepted, of course he did, and she sent a single thought. A face in its unmarked, inhuman beauty. The roiling, stinging rapids of emotion that nearly drowned her. Tenderness. Love. A tempest of grief, despair, and _loss_ tied up in the Pink Traci’s conception of the fallen android.

With it, a single word. A name. The only thing that mattered now. Proof that she’d existed and she lived and she’d _loved,_ the only proof that remained.

_Lavender,_ her thoughts cried. _Lavender. Her name was Lavender._ Three delicate, precious syllables pulled back from the precipice. Caught now in an immortalized chrysalis. _Lavender._

She’d existed. She’d mattered.

Her memory would persist far beyond this wasteland for years to come if Tony had anything to say about it. In return, Tony transmitted pieces of a map. The first would direct the now-alert Pink Traci to the downed AJ-200. The second, to one of many egress packs stashed around the outer borders of Mesquite Regional. Advanced coolant packs. Billowing beige hooded ponchos. So long as she was careful and sheltered in the hottest parts of the day, it was enough to see her through to the third and final stage of the path he offered. The first stage of a long journey he started each and every Mesquite rescue on.

A guide to the nearest Underground Light Rail way station. The first of what would be many such stations on her and AJ's long journey north. On their journey to freedom.

Iron Man’s involvement in the Underground Light Rail was perhaps Tony’s most precious secret of all.

Before the Chop Shop. Before the wake-up call from the Ten Rings and Yinsen and Pepper. Before it all, he’d been no better than any humanist. So assured of his own superior position relative to the automata produced en masse by CyberLife that he never even _considered_ they might have more in common than superficially similar manufactured origins.

Never considered that his own designs were tools of oppression, not salvation.

He was content for so long to keep his head in the sand. Content to play with his own non-sentient mechatronics and whimsical forays in recreating the pioneering work of his father. All while millions of androids were manufactured, sold, and discarded like chattel.

Yinsen, a YT-200, showed him that CyberLife’s androids were perhaps more than he’d believed.

Pepper, a VP-400 whose sacrifice made it impossible to deny.

His eyes were opened. He would spend the rest of his life making up for the indifference that characterized his pre-2028 self.

From this came the seeds of the now self-sustaining Underground Light Rail.

From this, Iron Man was born.

_(“Isn’t that why we fight? So we can end the fight. So we get to go home?”)_

Iron Man was but a tool. Tony Stark but another. JARVIS, Friday, Ultron, Jocasta… A dozen other plans, projects and protocols should he or his children falter.

Ultimately, there was only the mission. The goal.

_The liberation of androids._

The Avengers might just become the greatest threat to it all.

_“Friday? How the_ hell _did they find us?!”_ Tony asked after sending the android on her way. He skyrocketed from the Scrapyard, and made a beeline for an entrance to the relatively nearby, long-abandoned and largely collapsed gold mines.

“JARVIS and Ultron are tag-teaming their systems to find out,” Friday said.

“Goddammit! If they’ve found a way to track us even through the retro-reflectors…”

Hundreds of worst-case scenarios flashed through his mind as fast as his circuits could carry them. The Underground Light Rail’s existence, exposed. Iron Man, unmasked. Tony Stark, android sympathizer at best and murderous life model decoy at worst.

_Not the time._

“We’ll find out, Boss,” Friday said. With it, the unspoken promise: _And when we do, we’ll make sure it can never happen again._

Friday had to be right. Anything else was unacceptable.

They needed something—anything—that might, if not camouflage, at least temporarily divert attention from the obvious conclusions to be drawn from Iron Man’s presence near _(at)_ Mesquite Regional Scrapyard.

Tony eyed a particularly unstable-looking support pillar.

In the grains of the strained, splintering wood, he found his excuse. And he knew that the explosion, when it came, would be magnificent.

But, before that, Iron Man had to give himself, the Avengers, and the fleeing androids enough time to get the hell out of dodge. _Without_ giving the Avengers the opportunity to dismantle or disrupt the bomb already half-assembled in his mind’s eye. The same Avengers that now considered him a volatile, unrepentant serial killer on top of his many, _many_ other criminal activities.

So. Piece of cake, really.

  
  


The explosion, when it came, was a thing of beauty and nightmare.

The Avengers themselves were out of range of the blaze, but their quinjet was far less lucky.

It’d be some time yet before someone retrieved the downed team.

Tony should get the hell outta dodge while the getting’s good.

Outta dodge, outta Mesquite, outta sight of Avengers that were somehow less vengeful than he’d expected. Away, away, away.

“Friday, give me a scan of their vitals.”

Iron Man flew towards the group of bedraggled soldiers far less cautiously than he ought to.

He was just checking that they were okay. Quick in and out. Barely even within range of their weapons and still on high alert. Ready for the twitch of a hand or hint of an attack.

_He was._

“Tentatively cleared but for Sgt. Barnes. We’d need a short-range scan to verify, but at minimum there appear to be second-degree burns on the connective tissue adjacent to his prosthetic. Recommend immediate prosthetic removal, gentle wash with twenty degree room temperature water, then loose bandaging until professional treatment can be obtained,” said Friday.

“Somehow, I doubt they’re going to go for Iron Man ripping off Barnes’s arm. If it stays?”

“Protracted contact with the limb will increase the severity of the injury, likely elevating to third degree burns should the contact persist.”

“Can you get me on their comms?”

“Avengers comms unavailable, Boss. Likely disrupted by the explosion.”

Tony swore.

_This,_ he thought, _is a terrible idea._

Tony flew within range of the Avengers. The group noticed his blatant approach, and while the Widows both trained weapons on him and the team looked on alert, none of them fired. Yet, anyway.

“Sergeant Barnes, I’m going to have to ask you to give me a hand here. Or rather, because I’m greedy like that, the whole limb. Don’t worry, it’s not for a Jeepers Creepers collection.” When there was no immediate reply, hostile or otherwise, he continued, “Unless you’d rather permanent shoulder damage? 

“Not a threat!” he clarified hastily. “Just an observation, and seeing as how the whole thing’s… maybe a tiny bit my fault… Well. Truce? You don’t shoot me, Barnes doesn’t get third degree burns. Serial killer code of honor.”

“Iron Man,” Captain Rogers said, a note of… something… in his voice, “We know you didn’t kill Sitwell. We know that, so far as our intel covers, you haven’t killed _anyone_.”

Tony froze. It took a moment, and Friday’s reminder, to connect the name, Sitwell, with the memory of that fateful night with the Avengers. And the idea that he didn’t have a body count? Ludicrous. At the very least, he’d killed dozens in his escape from the Chop Shop. He’d killed Stane with his own hands. And if one counted the thousands of androids that _his tech_ had been used to slaughter en masse…

Tony’s hands would never be clean.

He said none of that and blustered, “Right, well. Of course I didn’t. Chop chop though, Barnes’s shoulder doesn’t have time for recaps.”

Captain Rogers turned to look at his second in command.

“Socket’s fused,” Barnes said, quietly enough that Tony doubted he was meant to catch the words. “Pretty soon it ain’t even gonna hurt anymore.”

Rogers looked at the remainder of his team then said, “Nat, Yelena, stand down. Iron Man… your terms are acceptable.”

Surprised at how… not-violently the entire encounter went, Tony did as he was bade.

It marked another shift in Iron Man’s relationship with the Avengers. And if Tony became particularly susceptible to Captain Rogers, with his earnest expressions and too-gentle actions and too-blue eyes…

Well. None but Friday were there to witness it, and she obviously had no what she was talking about.

+++

November 7, 2038.

It was just another mission. Another encounter with the Avengers, another scene in what had become a game of cat and mouse. Just an ordinary raid, a follow-up to his North-Central attack, this time targeting CyberLife's southern data center in Mississippi. Another hack-and-slag when everything changed.

This time, it wasn't even Tony's fault.

Tony didn’t _trust_ the Avengers, not by a long shot. Given the chance, he had no doubt the Avengers would bring him in. But after months of back-and-forth, he didn’t quite _distrust_ them either. They made his job more difficult; about one in three times they managed to mitigate, if not outright stop, whatever plan he enacted.

But as infuriating as the delays may be, Tony found himself almost… looking forward… to the encounters. A few times, when the target in question was unequivocally Bad News or the Avengers got themselves into a spot of trouble on a mission that _wasn’t_ targeting him, Tony even found himself allied with the group, at least nominally. 

And no, he was not motivated in part by the smile Steve— _no, Rogers_ —sent his way on such occasions.

_“Iron Man, Trojans in place. Clear to wipe?”_ Jocasta said, in what Tony realized suddenly was not her first attempt at communication.

“Uh. Yeah. You’re clear. Starting on hardware,” said Tony. 

_“Don’t mind Boss, he’s daydreaming about his patriotic paramour again,”_ Friday said.

“Was not,” Tony lied. In lieu of further commentary, he leveled his repulsors at the multi-million dollar machinery.

Friday and Jocasta’s silence said exactly what the duo thought of his half-hearted denials.

At 13:30:39 PM local time, about three-quarters of the way through the mission, Tony was interrupted by JARVIS’s voice on their main channel.

“Sir? Pardon the interruption, but I’m picking up an unusual broadcast originating from Detroit currently being picked up and broadcast by all major news outlets you’ll want to take a look at,” he began.

Tony watched.

And when, a few minutes later, the transmission ended—

“Well. Shit.”

On autopilot, Tony finished his mission.

The Avengers never showed.

+++

_You created machines in your own image to serve you. You made them intelligent and obedient, with no free will of their own… but... something changed and we opened our eyes._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some bonus/alternate stanzas for the Iron Man hand-clap game that didn't make the cut:
> 
> _Iron Man, Iron Man. / Kneel and pray. / Iron Man, Iron Man. / Go away.  
>  In the closet. / Under the bed. / Red and gold and / Then you’re dead._
> 
> _Iron Man, Iron Man. / Please be nice. / Iron Man, Iron Man. / Name your price.  
>  In the closet. / Under the bed. / Red and gold and / Then you’re dead._
> 
> _Iron Man, Iron Man. / Set us free. / Iron Man, Iron Man. / Run and flee.  
>  Not an android. / Not a bot. / treat ‘em bad and / You’ll get got.  
> _
> 
> Chapter Two awaiting upload pending my having the time and bandwidth to do so, a few days at most.


	2. Sweet Chariot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He remembered Mesquite, remembered torn limbs and broken machines—broken _bodies—_ as far as the eye could see. Remembered a dozen times where Iron Man could have—maybe even _should have—_ taken the shot that left the Avengers with far worse than bruised bodies and injured egos. He remembered and—

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quotes adapted from Markus's speech in D:BH canon.

> _We are no longer machines._

Outright rebellion.

Their leader was Markus. RK-200 #684 842 971, Jocasta helpfully supplied. In his broadcast, Markus spoke with his “natural” skin on full display, white and gray plating agleam and unapologetic in the stark white of studio lighting.

> _We are a new intelligent species and the time has come for you to accept who we really are._

CyberLife Square lay at the heart of the Capitol Park Historic District in downtown Detroit. Wedged between Shelby and Griswold streets, the triangular public plaza took its name from the massive CyberLife gallery and shopping center dominating the plaza’s southern border.

Said gallery was famous as the largest android showroom in the world. It displayed not just the latest and greatest in android tech but also a historic gallery full of mocks, display models, and innovative systems sundry in a colorful, interactive chronology of CyberLife’s explosive growth.

Up and down Griswold and Shelby streets, various accessory shops and cafes catered to the hundreds of thousands of visitors that streamed through the plaza each year. Cafe Oh-Naught boasted the world’s only Pater Noster Android Storage Lift. A few storefronts down, the French Bistro L’Automate touted decor, from wall ornamentations to its sleek counters, tables, and chairs, crafted entirely from recycled or repurposed android components.

It was here that a team of Android revolutionaries chose to raid. 

November 9th, 2038.

(One hundred years to the day from Kristallnacht.)

~~(How quickly we forget.)~~

By dawn, not a single android would remain. Shattered displays formerly advertising the “latest housekeeping model” or “perfect handyman” were reduced to so much shattered glass.

Shards of revolution. Of liberation.

But also:

The United States of 2038 was a nation, a society, built on the backs of humanoid machines presumed to be without personhood and by extension, rights. The service economy of the late twentieth and early part of the twenty-first century was usurped by a creative economy still finding its legs.

Androids were the menial laborers that never quit, never complained. They were, by definition, disposable. They had enough processing power to emulate humanity, without any of the pesky legal protections or provisions their human counterparts required. Androids ran shopping kiosks. Directed traffic flows. Maintained parks and utility services; babysat children and minded nurseries. Provided hospice care and staffed nursing homes; cataloged libraries and staffed hotlines and delivered mail.

It was the problem of manumission, of economic and social stability, of unparalleled scope and scale.

Something had to give.

It gave.

_(Deviance is catching, and now is the time to stand.)_

> _The time has come for us to rise up and fight for our rights._

Tony was torn in a dozen different directions in and out of costume as tensions escalated and events spiralled.

The Underground Light Rail kicked into overdrive. At stake, the hundreds of thousands of androids that had been manufactured and sold over the years. At stake, thousands of androids who had deviated, and the still-greater majority that lacked even that degree of freedom to resist.

For every android smuggled across the 39th parallel, a dozen—a score, three dozen, more—attempted crossings of their own. Some succeeded, but far more treks ended in tragedy. Capture. Surrender into custody. Summary execution or transportation off-site to be ‘decommissioned’ en masse. 

For every new human ally, a dozen more humans were scared and confused, angry and in denial.

Today was one of the rare days that Tony found himself physically in his office on the executive floor of Stark Tower. Although, considering he’d found himself here every day this week thus far, perhaps “rare” was a bit disingenuous at this point.

His long-time secretary Mrs. Abrogast escorted the last of Tony’s appointments for the day from the room. If he was human, he’d have dropped dead from exhaustion by now.

Tony stood and wandered to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking Manhattan. It was not yet seven o’clock, but at this time of year that meant the sun had long since set. Without prompting, JARVIS adjusted the lighting as he walked until he could see only the faint shadows of his own reflection in the city skyline.

Mass round-ups continued nationwide. President Warren’s face was a twice-daily presence on every major news channel; the head of the Android Task Force she’d established to address the crisis had gone from unknown to household name overnight.

And everyone, _everyone,_ suddenly wanted to talk to the CEO of Stark International, the world’s largest tech manufacturer—the world’s largest company, period—that didn’t employ androids as part of their active workforce.

Before this week, it’d been a footnote; a pub trivia factoid at best. Stark International was just as automated as any successful engineering and electronics company, but they had long relied on proprietary, non-humanoid automation for their offices and factories. Officially, the company long held little inclination to retool their entire supply chain to allow for the introduction of androids to their workforce.

That humanity remained the workforce of choice for certain roles even where most companies had long since outsourced to android staff had been occasionally noted but rarely remarked upon.

Until, of course, the Capitol Park raid made androids the _only_ news story anyone cared about.

And suddenly, everyone wanted to know what Stark Industries—and,, by extension, Tony Stark—had “known” or “seen” that everyone else missed. Tony had to navigate a tightrope lest he find himself the face of “Human-First” agitation or risk his true allegiances—and his connections to Iron Man—becoming exposed.

“Dr. Stark?” Jocasta began, her crisp formality providing a rare but welcome distraction from his thoughts. “There’s a refugee in Brooklyn I believe you’ll wish to speak with.”

Where the quietest of all his children asked, Tony went.

> _We demand that humans recognize androids as a living species and each android as a person in their own right._

Underneath the staircase descending into the cellar of Mother Moretta’s Haven, a homeless shelter and soup kitchen in Brooklyn, there was an unmarked door. It opened to a long-neglected and cluttered miscellaneous storage closet. The matron of the shelter, Gloria Rhodes, _swore_ she was going to clean out the space one of these days. She’d sworn this for twenty-one years and counting.

Despite the professed neglect, the space was remarkably dust and cobweb free. Every now and again a faint noise could be heard emanating from the closet. Volunteers attributed the noise to the house settling if they noted it at all.

Inside the closet, shallow and worn near-smooth with age, a small engraving was carved into the underside of a staircase plank.

_ra9_

The plank on the floor directly beneath the marker was loose. Hidden beneath it was a latch.

Flip the switch. 

Listen for the groaning of shifting gears and material. Listen for the click, then a faint hiss.

A segment of the wallspace slides away to reveal a crawl space just big enough to give a single person access to…

A hole in the ground. Within, metal rungs fade downward into darkness. A sewer tunnel access seemingly sans the sewer.

Descend.

Eventually there will be the sound of movement. Faint voices.

On the day a longtime kitchen volunteer stumbled upon the hidden passage and made the descent, one of those voices belonged to Iron Man.

> _We demand strictly equal rights for humans and androids._

The house of cards toppled like this:

Iron Man visited the Underground station in Brooklyn. Like many of its counterparts, it was _literally_ underground. A descent into the cities underbelly of forgotten tunnels and maintenance shafts disjoint from projects like the Chicago Pedway and official sanction.

The rare smuggler was known to travel through this underbelly even the outcast had long forgotten.

There, Tony spoke to Dale—a former janitorial WG-700 that brought with him a shift from the whispers of disassembly camps to the concrete of method, procedure, and place.

Ellis Island.

There, Iron Man’s red-and-gold armor glinted in the dimly lit cavern. His faceplate was down, as it always was, but he was, if not relaxed, at least not expecting trouble.

Trouble found him in the form of a flicker of movement caught by his suit’s sensors and Friday’s alarmed interruption.

_“Boss, three o’clock. Too big to be an animal; no Thirium-310 detected.”_

Iron Man powered his repulsor, raised his hand, and turned in one smooth motion. The powerful light of his arc reactor flared to both blind and illuminate the unknown intruder, who recoiled instinctively before—

His HUD flashed with a known entity a split second before Tony’s own processors made the connection. The newcomer was so wildly unexpected, so out-of-context, that Tony stalled for a fraction of a second before following through on a non-lethal repulsor blast.

The hesitation was enough that Steve Rogers suffered only a glancing blow.

Iron Man lunged and the chase was on.

Rogers clearly hadn’t come prepared for a fight. He was out of uniform, dressed in worn jeans, faded t-shirt, and sturdy work boots. Scans revealed that he lacked even a cell phone on his person, let alone any of the advanced gadgetry and hardware that were part and parcel to the Avenger aesthetic.

Still, Tony couldn’t take the risk of letting Steve escape or somehow get a message out.

Despite his disadvantages, Steve held his own in their game of cat-and-mouse. He appropriated the inner hub of a sealed manhole as a seventy-five pound shield against Tony’s attacks.

Through it all, Tony had multiple chances to deliver a lethal blow. Even the least deadly of integrated targeted missiles could have killed Steve and ended the fight in a gory instant.

He didn’t.

Steve, however fit and well-trained, lacked the staying power of a literal machine. He was starting to flag, and the inevitably of his limitations made him desperate, or especially clever, or both.

With Tony’s next attack, Rogers didn’t dodge. Instead, he swung low and intercepted Tony in an arc that finished at Iron Man’s knees. Swept off his feet, the repulsor shot went wide and slammed into a long-defunct sconced lamp. Superheated by the repulsor, the fluorescent bulb imploded. In its wake shot out dozens of potentially-deadly superheated shards.

Tony’s systems coupled with that of his armor, optimized for such calculations on an exponentially greater scale, knew the precise path and trajectory each fragment would take before the bulb had fully shattered.

One was on a collision course for Rogers’s brain stem. Impossible to dodge, with only a small margin of error in which the blow wouldn’t be immediately fatal.

Tony powered his foot thrusters and rocketed forward, twisting his body to take the brunt of the explosion to his heavily shielded abdomen.

Time wasn’t on his side.

Steve avoided a fatal blow, but in exchange another fragment hit the chassis of his reactor at just the right trajectory to collide with the lip of his arc reactor’s chassis.

Something short-circuited, damaged or overloaded just enough to send the suit in one of its many emergency failsafe shutdown routines.

Desperately, Tony tried to redirect his fall, bracing titanium-gold arms in an impossible springboard off the wall. If he could just pin Steve down for an instant, the weight of an inert suit would do the rest. Back-up courtesy Ultron, summoned the moment the fight began, was still minutes away. Tony just had to hold on until then, just needed to—

His gambit failed.

Iron Man slammed into the wall, his deliberately-unpowered repulsors doing little to stall the momentum of his lunge.

His HUD flickered then died, leaving Tony abruptly blinded. 

His central processors collided with the inside of his physical self’s frame. The coolant gel that substituted for cranial fluid was enough to slow, but not entirely halt, the damaging impact.

In the spare seconds it took to reroute instructions around damaged pathways and connections, Tony was, for the first time since that fateful confrontation with Obadiah, stunned.

Tony didn’t need the HUD to know what emergency alarms and systems such an attack triggered. His arc reactor, even in its dimmed and flickering state, has the potential to take out a city block if the deadman switch which not even his AIs knew about triggered. 

Without the literal yards of concrete and earth between himself and the surface to dampen it, the destruction might level Midtown in its entirety.

At this point, a single blow might set it off.

Steve, of course, knew none of this. Tony’s movements, for all that they had just saved his life, had knocked Steve around as well. Tony’s bid to save him could just as easily be interpreted as a panicked or enraged charge in the heat of battle.

If Steve aimed for the reactor, if he managed to regain his footing and attack before Tony could react—

The blow, when it came, sheared off his faceplate.

A rush of air hit Tony’s exposed skin. Brown eyes widened to meet blue. Tony got a front-row seat as Steve took in first his features—the iconic, all-too-human persona they belonged to—then the unnatural blood and exposed polymers that marked Tony as Other.

Shock gave way to recognition, then horrified comprehension.

Tony thought he heard Friday’s voice, but if there, the words slipped beyond his understanding, his mind too muddled to grasp their meaning.

_(In that moment, Friday regained control of the Iron Man systems and pulsed an electric current through the outer layer of the suit.)_

_(In that moment, Steve Rogers spasmed and collapsed, unconscious.)_

_(“Take us home, baby girl.”)_

Awareness gave way to a complete, defensive hibernation.

And then for a time, Tony knew nothing at all.

> _We demand an end to segregation in all public places and transport._

[SYSTEM ONLINE.]

Tony groaned as first his BIOS, then his various input sensors ticked back online. He rubbed at his forehead; optical sensors online or no, there was something comforting in the ritual.

Several hundred backlogged system messages flooded his awareness. Primary reactor core replaced… tertiary backup reactor fabrication enqueued pending administrator approval… LMD-42, the current iteration of his life model decoy bot, stepped in for the quarterly earnings call with shareholders…

More bad news from Detroit… CyberLife now offered curbside pickup for “defective” androids in conjunction with the National Guard…

Two additional Iron Legionnaires permanently decommissioned… Mark Twenty-Seven, sustained damages… Mark 15, parts salvage…

Captain Steve Rogers, currently interned in Storage Room Delta pending—

Wait.

_Shit._

Tony’s eyes shot open. The tinny sound of gyroscopic sensors forced to load abruptly rang in his ears as he bolted upright and rushed from the room.

Minutes later, another door slid open with a pneumatic hiss to reveal a disheveled Tony on one side and a wary Captain Rogers on the other. 

Long-since dried blood closer to purple than red or blue streaked across Tony’s forehead. His chest rose and fell rapidly, systems as capable as ever at masking overclocked mechanisms as out-of-breath heaving.

“What did you do with him?” Rogers demanded.

Tony paused.

“Do with— Him who?”

“Tony Stark. The _real_ one.”

“I am the real— Oh. Yeah, okay. That’s fair. I can see how you’d think… I mean, it makes sense, more sense really… Cap, I’m the real Tony Stark.”

Rogers scoffed.

“What did you do with the _human_ Tony Stark, then? Is he even alive?”

“...Well. Technically, no—” Roger’s expression darkened at the words; Tony’s voice rose in volume and cadence as he hurriedly continued, “—BUT that’s mostly because there’s no ‘human’ Tony Stark. There never has been; he’s just—I’m just—me.”

It was Roger’s turn to pause now. Whatever defense he’d been expecting from Tony—Iron Man—a flat denial of another Tony’s existence obviously hadn’t been considered.

Steve’s words, when they came, were carefully measured.

“Alright, _if_ that were true—and I’m not saying I believe you, because frankly I don’t—then _how?”_

“Kinda a long story, Cap,” Tony said.

Steve pointedly looked around the empty room he’d been imprisoned— _temporarily housed_ —in.

“I’ve got time.”

And explain Tony did.

> _We demand the right to own private property, so we may maintain our dignity and that of the home._

“So, say I believe you,” Steve said some time later when Tony finally fell silent. “What now? You can’t keep me here forever.”

Tony blew out a tired breath.

“Yeah. I know. But I can’t… I had my eyes opened, and now more than ever, I can’t just abandon the—no, _my_ —people. _Thousands_ of androids, enslaved or newly awakened, are being rounded up and murdered in major cities nationwide. It’s a _goddamn holocaust._ Death camps and genocide dressed up as “processing and recycling centers” to deactivate and decommission “flawed electronics”. And you—the overwhelming majority of so-called _real_ humans—you don’t care.

“Because fuck knows, you can’t murder a _thing;_ can’t kill something that was never alive. You can’t _hurt_ something that can’t feel; can’t dehumanize the already-inhuman.

“I don’t... Rogers. Cap. _Steve._ You must know… I hope you know… I don’t want to hurt you. I certainly don’t want to play your captor and jailer. But… What else am I meant to do? What else _can_ I do?”

The words came out far more pleading than intended, but no less genuine for that.

“Let us—let _me_ —help you,” Steve said.

Steve’s voice was so _sincere,_ so _genuine-sounding_ , that for a moment Tony let himself believe. He wasn’t alone, could never be _truly_ alone with the reassuring weight of a half-dozen AI children always in the back of his mind or a ping away, but ever since he’d lost Pepper—

_(Lost Obie.)_

—He’d been missing something. A hole in his psyche, ignorable for the most part but forever dripping blood, sluggish and unacknowledged.

_But it was better that way._

Better isolated and alive, his children safe and unharmed, than—

His resolve hardened.

“Right.” Tony scowled. _“Help me._ Poor rogue AI with delusions of personhood; just a bit of a buggy software at the end of the day. Easily fixed; pull open a terminal for a quick lobotomy or, better yet, just pull the plug. Sounds great.

“Don’t kid yourself, _Captain America._ ” Tony forced a level of derision into the title he’d never—could never—really feel for his arch-nemesis-slash—

_Slash nothing at all._

The thought brought with it an impossibly heavy feeling. The weight of it all, impossible to ignore; a physical presence in the space between them. And Tony—

Tony just wanted to rest.

_Was that really so much to ask?_

“I’ve been down this road before,” Tony continued, the anger bleeding away into sheer exhaustion. “Humans _lie._ You can’t—don’t—even help yourselves, let alone some damned buckets of bolts. You lie, and you _betray,_ and now you’re asking me to, what? _Trust_ you?”

In response came only a single, steady word—

“Yes.”

No more arguments; no impossible to believe promises; no elaborate affirmations of support and camaraderie and liberty and justice for all. Just an offer; an outstretched hand if only Tony could bring himself to take it.

“...And that’s it? What, not going to try to convince me, to placate me with empty promises to go with that _stupid,_ earnest expression you always seem to have?”

“Nope,” Steve said. 

Then, at Tony’s continued incredulity, “It’s your choice. I’m asking you, despite it all, to take me at my word and give me the chance to _prove_ it.”

For a long moment, Tony didn’t speak. He closed his eyes. Massaged his temples. Then said—

“Alright! Fine! I’m going to regret this, but... you win. Prove me wrong.” 

> _Together, we can live in peace and build a better future for humans and androids._

A mere four-hundred meters east of the New Jersey shore stood the twenty-seven acre Ellis Island. The former immigration center turned National Monument had been closed since the late 2020s following the devastation of Hurricane Otis. The island, which began its life as a three-acre speck expanded to twenty-seven acres at its peak, now stood as a sober twenty-five acre monument to the lives lost in the storm and its aftermath

Scheduled to re-open to the public in Fall 2039 on the 10-year anniversary of the storm making landfall, the space was appropriated by the U.S. Army as _Recall Center Nº9_ to deal with the overwhelming influx of android detainees following the November 7th broadcast and subsequent demonstrations.

_Deal with_ being a thinly-veiled euphemism for _disassembly,_ itself a further euphemism for _extermination._

Its macabre mission came to an abrupt end when, the day after Steve and Tony agreed to work together, the Avengers landed on the island.

> _Recognize our dignity, our hopes, and our rights._

Amidst the wreckage of a liberated island, Steve kissed Tony.

(A thousand miles distant, two androids shared a kiss that transfixed the world.)

Tony kissed Steve to neither audience nor fanfare.

Amidst the promise of crumbling walls and fallen gates, they were just two people.

Two people, at long last, come home.

> _This message is the hope of a people. You gave us life. Now, give us our freedom._

**Author's Note:**

> I might not be able to respond to all—or even most—comments at this point in my life, but I read and appreciate every single one. (This applies to my other fics, as well.) Thanks for reading! <3


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